EXPRESSLY FOR RADICAL INTELLECTUALS WHO SEEK KNOWLEDGE
(*******WARNING: HAZARDOUS TO NEOCON DELUSION*******)
HOMOSEXUALITY IN ANCIENT AFRICA
Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Lives is an excellent book by Dr. Gail Elizabeth Wyatt. Read it today. It expertly examines Black female sexuality. It is afrocentric and candid. It is written so that it may be as valuable to a teenager as it is to the mother of a teenager. Every sister and every person who loves a sister should read this book.
It is because I love this book so that I am so deeply wounded by the following quote taken from it: "[In Africa] There were sexual practices that were not condoned, such as adultery, rape, incest or homosexual relationships." No true scholar would ever make any blanket statements about any cultural practices in Africa. Africa is a HUGE continent with HUNDREDS of tribes. Each tribe has diverse traditions and practices.
It is true that some African tribes do not condone homosexuality. It is equally true that some African tribes DO condone homosexuality. It is wrong and homophobically cruel to state otherwise, as Wyatt has done.
I LOATHE this special pseudo-African brand of gaybashing. I was especially repulsed to find it tainting the pages of this excellent book. Sex is an expression of love. Homosexual love is just as natural and real as heterosexual love. No true scholar ever equates homosexuality with pathology. In fact, the overwhelming majority of rapists, pedophiles, and adulterers globally are HETEROSEXUAL men.
Homosexuality is ancient and universal. Africa is the First World. The first humans were African. Thus, clearly, the first homosexual humans were African also.
I cannot express the EXCRUCIATING emotional pain of being denied my heritage and homeland because I am a lesbian. It is a brutal act of bigotry that stings my very soul. Gaybashers, like homosexuals, are everywhere. Yet, I have NEVER heard a white gaybasher tell a white lesbian that she is not a true European because she is gay.
Many lesbian women and girls will read Stolen Women. The truth about homosexuality in Africa should not be stolen from them as they do so. They should not be omitted from the legacy of African sisterhood simply because they are homosexual.
I REFUSE to EVER allow anyone to imply that Africa was EVER a heterosexist utopia!!! No such world has ever existed. And, it never will. Homosexuals, like heterosexuals, are eternal.
The following quotes are taken from scholars of African history:
"Gays: Guardians of the Gates" by Malidoma Some M.E.N. Magazine,
1993 [http://www.afrinet/~hallh/afrotalk/afrojun95/0995.html] (Some is a Dagara tribesman of Burkina Faso; east of Nigeria and north of Ghana):
"...But at least among the Dagara people, gender has very little to do with anatomy. It is purely energetic. The whole notion of gay does not exist in the indigenous world. That does not mean that there are not people who feel this way that certain people feel in this culture, that has led to them being referred to as gay...The gay person is looked at primarily as a gatekeeper...Any person who is at this link between this world and the other world experiences a state of vibrational consciousness which is far higher and far different from the one that a normal person would experience. This is what makes a gay person gay...You decide that you will be a gatekeeper before you are born. So when you arrive here, you begin to vibrate in a way that Elders can detect as meaning that you are connected with a gateway somewhere...
Now, gay people have children, because they are normal people. So to then limit gay people to simple sexual orientation is really the worst harm that can be done to a person....I think this is again victimization by a Christian establishment that is looking at a gay person as a disempowered person, a person who has lost his job from birth onward, and now society just wants to fire him out of life. This is not justice...
What keeps a village together is a handful of gays and lesbians, as they call them in the modern world. In my village, lesbians are called witches and gay men are known as gatekeepers. These are the only two secret societies. These are the only groups that will get together as a separate group and go out into the woods secretly to do whatever they do.
They come from the Otherworld, and they keep the gates to the Otherworld. Because, if the gates are shut, this is when earth, Mother earth, will shake. Because it has no more reason to be alive. It will shake itself and we will be in deep trouble. Unless they go out on their yearly symposium, the village cannot be granted another year of life...This constantly reiterated discomfort and hatred for the gay person [in the modern world] is again another indication that every year we might as well be prepared for the apocalyptic moment when the stars start to fall to earth...
The great astrologers of the Dogon are gay...Why is it that everywhere else in the world, gay people are a blessing and in the modern world they are a curse? It is self-evident. The modern world was built by Christianity. They have taken the gods out of the earth and sent them to heaven, wherever that is...."
The Lesbian Spirit, Girlfriends Magazine, July 1994 [Re: The Dagar tribe of Burkina Faso, West Africa]:
"Nothing is truly intimate outside of ritual, says Sobanfu Some...Sexuality, including woman-to-woman sexuality, is so integrated into the spiritual life of the Dagarat that her people have no word to specify lesbian or even sex....Like many other Africans, the women of Dagara do not sleep with their men. Women need to sleep together, to be together to empower each other...then if they meet with men, there is no imbalance.
Tribal women not only sleep and live together, they join together for group rituals. We go to a cave or bush and do rituals to build male energy. We have a female father who gives us male energy. She looks like a male. Anything we feel or experience that we haven't dealt with is expressed. This women's group ritual balances their male/female energy. It is so we are not completely male or female.
Dagarat women believe that once you've made love with your life partner in this circle, it is extremely dangerous for her to be intimate with another woman. If you break the circle, you bring in alien energy. Your partner will die. The diviner in our village comes in and says You murdered her...Sobanfu also says women must look at sex as a journey. You are traveling to a place not known by you or your partner. Only your ancestors know. When two people merge, your genealogy becomes a participant in what's going on."
The Alyson Almanac Alyson Publications:
"The Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten and his lover Smenkhkare were the first historically documented male couple in history. Their homosexuality does not seem to have bothered Akhenaten's contemporaries, but his challenge to the clergy brought his downfall. The priests joined forces with the army and assassinated Akhenaten and Smenkhkare, and Tutankhamen was made Pharaoh."
Out in the World: Gay and Lesbian Life From Buenos Aires to Bangkok by Neil Miller:
"Many stories credit Africa with producing the Amazons. Beginning in the 18th century and continuing throughout the 19th century, there was an all woman army maintained by the King of Dahomey (West Africa).
There are at least 33 different cultures in Africa (From the Yoruba in Northern Nigeria and the Barenda of the Northern Transvaal, to the Kamba of East Africa) where marriages between women are recognized. Academics are quick to deny that lesbianism has any role in such arrangements despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
One study on homosexuality in Africa indicates that of 78 cultures, with little contact with Western values, 49 approved of or at least tolerated homosexuality. This may indicate that homophobia (NOT homosexuality) is a Western colonial import."
Brother to Brother, anthology edited by Marlon Riggs
"Some Thoughts on the Challenges Facing Black Gay Intellectuals" by Dr. Ron Simmons:
"For a reference, Ben Jocannan cites E. Wallis Budges The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Budge however does not use the word sodomy. Three of the 42 Negative Confessions stated in the hieroglyphic text refer to sexual activity. Number 22: I have not polluted or defiled myself. Ben Jocannan misinterpreted that as forbidding homosexuality. A study of the hieroglyphic reveals that the Negative Confession of polluting and defiling oneself actually refers to masturbation or the irregular emission of semen, NOT sodomy. There is a hieroglyphic symbol that means sodomy and it is not used ANYWHERE in the Negative Confessions.
Why should Africa's descendants base their lives and their future on the Koran or the Bible? The Koran is not an artifact of African culture. It is Arabian. And, the bible was given to us by white slavemasters. Europeans and Arabs enslaved Africans. So why should we be subservient to their books?"
Lesbian Connection, May 1993:
"A judge in the state of Swaziland (South Africa) has ruled that a marriage between two women is valid. According to Swazi tradition, two women can lawfully contract a marriage as long as the parents of both women consent, and the woman who pays the bride-price (lobola) can delegate a man to father children on her behalf. The judgment confirming the legality of this ancient practice was issued following a trial in which Thalita Mngomezulu accused a man of defrauding her of four cows. She gave evidence that the cattle had been given as lobola for the woman she wished to marry."
Inside Gay Africa BlackOut Magazine, Fall 1986:
"We can blame the white man for many things, but men have been doing this with each other for a long, long time... The Watusi still have a reputation for bisexuality in the cities of East Africa...Zande women risked execution by pleasuring each other, sometimes with phalluses fashioned from roots... In this part of Zaire, homosexuality had a mystical element to it... Bisexuality is also quite common among the Bajun tribes of east Africa."
For more information on homosexuals in Africa read:
One More River to Cross by Keith Boykin
Brother to Brother an anthology edited by Essex Hemphill
Male Daughters and Female Husbands Ifi Amadiume
The Alyson Almanac Alyson Publications
Lesbian Lists Dell Richards
Our Dead Behind Us Audre Lorde
Out In The World: Gay and Lesbian Life From Buenos Aires to Bangkok Neil Miller
Also see two classic documentaries on homosexuality in Africa:
DAKAN
&
WOUBI CHERI
Homosexuals are everywhere. We always have been. We always will be. When African homosexuals were in the bowels of slave ships, they were locked in the same iron chains, not pink triangle bracelets. When African slaves were lynched, they wore the same rope nooses, not knotted rainbow flags. Gaybashers shame all of their African ancestors, across oceans of time...
written by Alicia Banks
Radio Producer, Talk Show Host, DJ, Columnist
ELOQUENT FURY
REVOLUTIONARY AFRICAN
